What types of hosting plans are available?

Overview

DreamHost offers several different types of hosting plans running on the Ubuntu operating system. Most sites work well on the basic Shared hosting plan, however if your site is getting a large amount of traffic or if you need to make customizations not available to shared users, you may need to upgrade to a VPS, Dedicated, or DreamPress plan.

You can find further details at DreamHost Hosting which describes the various options available to you as a DreamHost customer.

NOTE: There is currently not an email-only hosting plan available at DreamHost. If you need email, you must add a website hosting plan first.

What if my domain is registered at another company?

You can still host your site at DreamHost if your registration was purchased at another company. You just need to point your DNS to DreamHost. The other option would be to transfer the registration to your DreamHost account. View the following articles for further details:

Starter Shared hosting

Starter Shared is DreamHost's introductory Shared hosting plan that's geared for users who are new to web hosting. It's also a perfect solution for a personal or business website that displays simple information about yourself or services that you offer.

What's included?

Since this is a starter plan, there are a few limitations that don't exist with a regular Shared plan. For example, a Starter Shared plan offers the following:

Pricing

Adding a Starter Shared plan

Shared hosting (a.k.a. Happy Hosting)

On a shared server, you 'share' server space with other customers. Though no other customer has access to your files, you and the other customers share the resources of the server. This means that if another website on the same server is receiving a large amount of traffic and using a lot of CPU resources, it's possible that your site may run slower as a result.

While DreamHost works hard to make sure all sites on a shared server never disrupt other sites, this is always a possibility due to the nature of shared hosting.

What can I host on shared hosting?

Shared hosting is perfect for blogs, portfolios, personal/business sites, and database-driven sites. Visit the following page for further information:

Pricing

VPS hosting

The DreamHost Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a premium hosting solution that runs on Solid State Drives (SSDs.) It is available as an add-on to an existing DreamHost plan or a standalone service.

DreamHost VPSs use Linux-VServer to create a "virtual machine" that protects a user's CPU and RAM resources from other users on the same physical machine. This is accomplished by kernel level isolation which allows the server to run multiple virtual units at once. Those units are sufficiently isolated to guarantee the required security, but utilize available resources efficiently, as they run on the same kernel.

Comparison of Shared and VPS hosting

On a shared server, resources are shared by other users. On a VPS, these resources are more isolated which improves performance and helps to maintain stability.

You also have the ability to control how much RAM your server uses. On a shared plan, this is limited to a specific amount; but on a VPS, you get to select how much RAM your server can use.

What can I host on a private server?

A VPS is ideal for websites that require more resources than a shared server can provide, yet do not need the full power of a Dedicated server. It's ideal for businesses, ecommerce, designers, and developers.

Pricing

Apache and Nginx

If you have upgraded to a VPS or Dedicated server, you have the option to run Nginx as your web server. Shared and DreamPress hosting must use Apache. View the following article for a detailed comparison:

Email hosting

All Shared, VPS, DreamPress, and Dedicated hosting plans include email service. DreamCompute-only plans do not include email hosting.

MySQL hosting

With any Shared or VPS hosting plan, you also have free access to a shared MySQL server. This Shared MySQL server can store all of your databases for all of your websites. Since it's a shared server, resources are 'shared' with other customer in the same way as a shared web server mentioned above.

If you need more database resources than the Shared MySQL server can offer, you can purchase a private MySQL server.